EHM The Blue Line

That's assuming I make the playoffs any time soon. - 99% of my team was born yesterday.

I'm sure the draft will feel great, though. After competing with human intelligence for those prospects, I would imagine it'll feel like a real accomplishment to walk away with some good picks.

It is. Big time. lol. They can extremely frustrating though when your shrtlist disappears a selection or two before your pick.

In other news we're starting a new EHM05 league. The NBHL is in it's infancy currently. The DB is being updated and tweaked. We're hoping with Stinson's recent enjoyment of the online experience we can recruit a few more of you knowledgeable members looking to challenge yourselves and expand the online community here at the TBL.

Speaking of the draft, how exactly does that work?

I remember reading that it would be via the forums, but in what way, and how do our picks actually get completed?

It's complicated...it's done like a live sim. we have two convo windows. one for chatting/whatever. one for drafting. There'll be a thread for the draft. As people get picked somebody will update the draft list as it goes, we'll also have the ranked players and remove them as it happens, and add unranked guys as we go. Afterwards the game goes down and somebody has to take control of all 30 teams and input every choice (it's easier this way incase sombody freezes and the entire draft gets lost). Usually takes 3-4 hours depending on the number of people. This probably doesn't make a lot of sense, but, if you look at the previous drafts on the site it'll become clearer to you. Some guys do up draft lists and some guys let it go bpa (which would be highest ranking skater on the board, usually a horrible idea).

So is the advertisement thread for leagues gone intentionally? Did I miss something?

Name: Ismael Bilodeau
Location: Quebec Canada
Time zone: GMT -5
Available times: All the Week

dybbuk wrote:So is the advertisement thread for leagues gone intentionally? Did I miss something?

Nope. Sorry. A bit of housekeeping. It should be back shortly.

Right on. Thanks B.

Well...today was the first Live EHM draft for TBL's very own Brandon Stinson...I could email him and ask him what he thought about it and how it compared to an offline EHM draft, but I would really like for everyone to hear what he thought about it.

I am hoping he found it as entertaining as I do for 99% of the drafts I have been to.

B. Stinson wrote:That's assuming I make the playoffs any time soon. - 99% of my team was born yesterday.

I'm sure the draft will feel great, though. After competing with human intelligence for those prospects, I would imagine it'll feel like a real accomplishment to walk away with some good picks.

I'm with Drew. How did you find it man? It's pretty lively eh? Not sure if many people bugged you for picks, but, I had a few convo's rolling, had 5-8 going all day pretty much. lol I might of had the best draft day though.

Drew, it's actually Brian.

As for the draft, it was awesome. It really wasn't much different than a typical live online draft you'd see in fantasy sports, which I've always enjoyed doing. It wasn't quite as "real-time", since it's done via MSN, then manually entered into the game later, but it was darn close to being real-time with the incredible job Rahim (rk2k3_OIL, here at TBL) did running the draft. He had both the Draft Board and Top-200 lists up-to-date within the minute, usually sooner. Huge thanks to him for doing such a good job with that, and making it so easy to make selections.

Comparing it to an offline draft: it was so much better being online. It felt like 100 times more of an event than it does solo. We started at 12:00 noon, and ended at about 16:30. Which says even more for the job Rahim did - manually coordinating a dozen or so people through a full 7-round draft, and getting it done in about the same time it would take for a computer-run fantasy draft.

The only "loss" is that we can't use the staff recommendations since we don't draft in-game. But for me, that wasn't a big loss - I never use that feature offline anyway, at least not until I hit the late rounds and get bored, and use it simply to get the draft over with without making horrible picks. Once you're online, it's fun to go and find your own players - especially since you have plenty of time to do it while waiting for your turn at the podium. Just like a real draft. Which actually becomes an advantage, because you're forced to have time to think about your next pick and do some proper research, instead of making impulsive picks like you might do offline.

And now: we look forward to seeing how our picks turn out. I'm excited for my first rounder: Defenseman, Boyd Higgins. I'm gonna have two very good, and young defensemen on my team in a few years with him and Diego together. I'm disappointed I couldn't get a better goalie, though. I decided to take a gamble that Redlihs would still be there for my 3rd round pick, but Charbs had to go and steal him in round 2! I had a feeling it would happen, though - there weren't many good goalies to choose from, so they were probably gonna go fast.

But yeah, overall, it was a lot of fun, and very involving. It's just one more thing making online play so much fun.

*sticking foot in mouth* in regards to the name, don't know what made me think brandon =P

Even though Brian already gave a thumbs up to Rahim, I am also going to as well...nobody can even imagine the work that goes into hosting one of these drafts, and Rahim runs one of the best drafts I have seen (even though I missed this one).

Higgins looks like hes gonna be a top 5 Dman in the league someday. He was also the 2nd best player in the draft I think, so you made out pretty good as its very hard to get a top 2 guy from anything other than those picks.

Whats most interesting about online drafts are everyone has a different perspective. For example Redlihs I had going in first round, while you had him possibly as a third rounder. It is awesome to see where other guys go and how people pick, also not so awesome when you find a guy unranked hoping to leave him til 2nd or third round, and some jerk who scouted as hard as you did goes and takes him in the 1st, but even that is fun.

I had many people cursing me out. I didn't even have any ranked goalie on my radar, just two unr ones, who are looking pretty sweet.

there is a nice goalie that will go top 10 in next years draft.

stinson - you really do have two top notch youngsters anchoring your d now.

bump? did the online thing work?

its up and running. going into 3rd seson next now.

its an very active and live community with very good gms.

u cant just pack some noobs for a franshise player in online ehm

i strongly recomend it to ehm players that want a challange and a social game at same time. game is up always and gets simmed about 7*4 + 32-36 days a IRL weak.

http://s1.zetaboards.com/NBHL/index/

Name: Mikko Saarela
Location: Finland GMT+2
Times when I'm able to play: From Monday to Friday 2pm-10pm, but usually I play 2pm-6pm. Saturday is usually quite busy but on Sunday I am able to play 12am-5pm or even more.

Name: Chace trepanier
Location:Eastern standard time
Times when I'm able to play: From Monday to Friday 6pm-10pm, Saturday Sunday after 7